The coronavirus pandemic makes the need for countries to care for the environment more urgent, the Vatican said in a document released Thursday.
The document, a five-year commemoration of Pope Francis’s landmark encyclical Laudato si’, argued that the pandemic “renders ever more evident, five years from its publication, the value” of the letter’s message.
Laudato si’ was controversial when it was released, especially in the United States, where many Catholics said that the pope should not be getting involved with environmental or political causes. At the same time, Sen. Bernie Sanders and former Vice President Joe Biden embraced it, with the latter including his support for the letter in his 2020 campaign platform.
Laudato si’ argues that the destruction of the earth is a symptom of a worldwide neglect for the poor. The Vatican on Tuesday said that the way in which the coronavirus pandemic laid bare the gaps between the rich and the poor vindicated that position, noting that “the health emergency, the solitude, the isolation to combat contagion, have put us suddenly face-to-face with our fragility as finite creatures.”
The document also includes explicit calls to members of the media, asking them to highlight the “human destiny and the natural environment” in their reporting and fight “fake news” on the subject.
